News

Cornice has introduced a new series of miniature hard drives intended for a wide range of consumer electronics, including handhelds and smartphones.

The company's new Dragon series includes improvements in virtually every area.

Cornice's latest microdrives' capacity has jumped up to 8 gigabytes (GB) today, and a 10 GB version will be available in the near future.

Despite this, by narrowing the casing around the disk and by shrinking the height, Cornice was able to the Dragon series drives smaller than their predecessors.

In addition, these latest drives use half the power of this company's previous versions.

These microdrives can withstand excessive shaking, extreme drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing.

Cornice is charging $85 per unit, as long as a company is willing to buy at least 10,000 per year.

More information on the Dragon series is available on Cornice's web site.

The Future Will Be Perpendicular

At the Consumer Electronics Show, going on now in Las Vegas, Cornice is demonstrating prototype microdrives using perpendicular recording technology (PMR), a new hard drive technology that will double today's capacities.

Longitudinal recording aligns the data bits horizontally, parallel to the surface of the disk. In contrast, perpendicular recording aligns the bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk, which allows additional room on a disk to pack more data, enabling higher recording densities.

Cornice will apply PMR to its next-generation products and expects a majority of its drives to use this technology starting the second half of 2006.

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